84 per cent of family offices say geopolitics is their top concern. They are not changing much.

BlackRock surveyed 175 single family offices between March and May 2025. The respondents collectively oversee more than $320 billion in assets. The headline: 84 per cent cited geopolitical uncertainty as their most important concern. Sixty per cent described themselves as pessimistic about the global outlook.

Those are large numbers. The interesting part is what they are doing about it.

The portfolio picture

Alternatives now make up 42 per cent of the average family office portfolio, up from 39 per cent in 2022-2023. That shift has been gradual, not reactive. The move into alternatives is a multi-year trend driven more by return expectations and diversification logic than by geopolitical fear.

Within alternatives, two areas are seeing the most attention. Thirty-two per cent of respondents plan to increase their allocation to private credit over the next two years. Thirty per cent plan to increase their allocation to infrastructure.

Both make sense in the current environment. Private credit benefits from higher base rates and tighter bank lending standards. Infrastructure benefits from the combination of energy transition demand and the physical build-out required for AI and data centre capacity.

The AI allocation

More than half of the offices surveyed invest in companies expected to benefit from AI growth. Forty-five per cent invest in firms building AI solutions directly. And 33 per cent are using AI tools internally to improve their own investment processes, a number that has been rising but remains lower than many expected.

The AI theme is now sufficiently embedded in family office allocations that it has moved past the “emerging opportunity” stage and into the “assumed allocation” stage. The question is no longer whether to invest in AI but how much and through which channels.

The OCIO question

A quarter of family offices now use, or would consider using, an outsourced chief investment officer. That number is significant. It suggests that a meaningful minority of single family offices have concluded that they do not have the internal capability to manage the complexity of their own portfolios, particularly in areas like alternatives, private credit, and cross-border allocations.

More than half recognised gaps in internal expertise around reporting, deal sourcing, and private market analytics.

What the survey tells you

Family offices are worried. They are not panicking. The geopolitical concern is genuine, but it is not translating into large-scale portfolio rebalancing. The moves are incremental: a few more percentage points into private credit, a bit more infrastructure, a continued lean into alternatives over public markets.

That is probably the right response. Geopolitical risk is by definition hard to time and hard to price. Selling equities because you are worried about geopolitics tends to cost more than it saves, because the risk rarely materialises in the way or at the time you expected.

The smarter family offices are treating geopolitics not as a reason to move but as a reason to diversify more carefully. More jurisdictions, more asset classes, more liquidity within the portfolio. That is less dramatic than a wholesale reallocation, but it is probably more durable.